By Lloyd Alter at TreeHugger.com posted a great blog on glass towers and their lack of resilience. There’s been quite a building boom in Toronto, and residents of those new heavily glazed high-rise buildings will be in serious trouble should there be an extended power outage. You can read the blog
Bigger, Longer Heat Storms Are Coming Soon: Will Your Building Keep Its Cool?
Editor’s note: Tom Phillips and I have been corresponding about the risks of temperature extremes, and I invited him to put together an article on the topic so that others could benefit from his research. I am posting that here. -Alex Wilson Floods and ice storms cause some the biggest
By It Ain’t Necessarily So
Korky Koroluk, columnist for the Daily Commercial News, explores the contradictory effects that can result from energy-efficiency retrofits. It has been persuasively argued by some that adding more efficient energy systems tends to reduce the amount of energy used, thus lowering over-all energy costs. But that, it is argued, tends
By 2012 CERES Insurance Industry Study: Progress Slow, Urgently Needed
Climate-change-related disasters threaten industry profitability, and may drive less-prepared companies from a variety of asset and risk classes. A reduction in the availability and affordability of insurance and risk management services can threaten the economy…
Making Los Angeles Resilient
Lisa Novick has a very good blog on what Los Angeles should do to boost it’s resilience on the Huff Post Los Angeles. The blog includes a nice definition of resilience: “Resilience is defined as the capacity of a system to absorb shock and still maintain its identity and function.
2012 Temperatures – One For the Record Books
For those who have made a habit of following temperature records over the past few decades, what’s most surprising with today’s news isn’t that 2012 set a record for U.S. temperatures (that had been expected for months), but rather the extent of that record. If you go back to the
Vulnerabilities to Climate Change and the Need For Resilience in the Western U.S.
The January, 2013 issue of Land Lines, a publication of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, has an excellent article on climate change impacts in the Intermountain West and the need for resilience. “Uncertainty and Risk: Building a Resilient West” addresses drought, growing incidence of wildfire, population growth, and factors
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #6: Natural Cooling
A blog on cooling? In September? What gives? In my recent series of blogs, I’ve been laying out some of the basics of resilient design—which will become all the more important in this age of climate change. Achieving resilience in homes not only involves keeping them comfortable in the winter
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #5: Passive Solar Heating
When combined with a highly insulated building envelope, passive solar is the best way to ensure that a home will maintain livable conditions in the event of loss of power or heating fuel. As I discussed in my previous blog, a resilient home is extremely well-insulated, so that it can
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #4: Dramatically Better Building Envelopes
When most people think about resilience—resilience during a storm, for example—they think only about resilience during the event. How effectively will the building withstand strong winds or flooding? Equally important, if not more important, is resilience in the aftermath of that event. Hurricanes, ice storms, blizzards, wildfires, tornadoes, and other
Fundamentals of Resilient Design #1: Making the Case
I thought a lot about resilience last year, during a six-week sabbatical bike ride through the Southwest. I covered a little over 1,900 miles, most of it over land that hadn’t seen a drop of rain since the previous fall; some of those areas—mostly in Texas—still hadn’t received significant precipitation months after my return home.
